Mr. Speaker, I am glad to have the opportunity to speak here this afternoon in favour of the motion because I am concerned about the future of Canada's forest industry.
I come from British Columbia, which, as most people know, has some of the most magnificent forest resources anywhere in the world. From the rainforests of cedar and hemlock on the coast to the vast pine, fir, and spruce forests of the interior, British Columbia produces more than half the softwood lumber in Canada.
The forest industry has been a critically important part of the British Columbian economy for over a century. Today, it contributes $12 billion every year to the B.C. economy. It provides $2.5 billion in direct government revenue in British Columbia. It creates 145,000 jobs in British Columbia alone. That is one in every 16 jobs in British Columbia. That figure was touted to be closer to one in every two jobs when I was younger, but the industry has been hit hard over the past few decades.
The softwood lumber agreement of 2006 came after over 20 years of disputes between the two countries. At the heart of those disputes was the claim by the United States that the Canadian forest industry was subsidized by the way companies paid for the harvesting of wood from public lands. That claim has repeatedly been repudiated by both international and American tribunals. I think we won something like 14 legal decisions in a row between 1982 and 2005. Despite these victories, the actions of the U.S. industry brought uncertainty to the lumber export market and cost our industry billions of dollars.
The softwood lumber agreement did bring back certainty to lumber export access and costs, but the Canadian industry paid a very high price for that certainty and many mills did not survive those added costs and quotas; especially, after years of wearying trade battles with the United States.
In my riding, the Weyerhaeuser mill in Okanagan Falls closed in 2007, putting over 200 people out of work. The Pope & Talbot mill in Midway closed in 2007 as well, but fortunately, has been reopened by the Vaagen Brothers, which has invested in new equipment to create a highly efficient mill that uses the smaller logs that are easier to find in today's wood supply. The Atco lumber company in Fruitvale closed its lumber operation around the same time to concentrate on veneer products for plywood, which are not subject to softwood lumber quotas and tariffs. The surviving mills in my riding strive to be as efficient as possible, trying to get the right logs to the right mill. It does not always work, the system is far from perfect, but for the moment the mills are doing well.
As elsewhere in Canada, waste wood in all the local mills is usually chipped and sent to the local pulp mill, in my case, it is the Celgar mill in Castlegar, to add a bit to the bottom line for the mills. The pulp mills also depend on the input of those chips. I heard testimony from a pulp mill representative, a couple of weeks ago, at the finance committee pre-budget consultation in Alberta, that pulp mills in Alberta would be hooped, in his words, if local sawmills closed because of inaction on the softwood lumber agreement.
As I tour my riding today, I see a forest industry that is innovative and efficient, each mill specializing in some niche that will allow it to survive and hopefully thrive. I imagine that is the case across British Columbia and across Canada.
The industry faces challenges from all sides today, and one of the main challenges these companies face is uncertainty. When I ask representatives from the forest industry about a new softwood agreement, they agree that the former agreement has brought some amount of certainty and stability to the lumber market in Canada, but feel that it failed, in some areas, to protect Canada's interests in an unfair trade negotiation.
The forest industry would like to see the agreement renewed, but not at any cost. It does not want to see a new agreement that is more punitive than the last, since it is clear that countervailing duties are not legally warranted at all. It recognizes that we need an agreement that is flexible to the needs and circumstances of the different regions in Canada.
The Liberal government promised quick action on this file. It repeatedly said these negotiations were an example of how things go right when the President of the United States is a good friend of the Prime Minister, but it has failed to deliver and the Canadian forest industry is clearly worried about the future. We need to get a new agreement in place. The government can and must do more for the forest industry than just get this softwood agreement.
The industry, especially in British Columbia, has been working hard to build new international markets for our lumber products. It has been working on innovative new wood products and new ways to use wood in buildings. It would be a great boost to the Canadian forest industry as a whole if the federal government instituted a wood-first policy that promoted the use of wood in government building projects.
In my hometown of Penticton there is a company called Structurlam, which builds huge glulam beams for beautiful structural supports for large buildings. It also manufactures crosslam wood panels, which combine with the beams to allow the construction of very tall buildings without steel and concrete. The company just completed an 18-storey project at the University of British Columbia, called Brock Commons. It is the tallest wood building in the world, and because the parts are built off-site, the Brock Commons building took only 66 days to construct. The UBC project used 1.7 million board feet of British Columbia lumber. Structurlam gets its lumber locally at mills such as Kalesnikoff in Castlegar, so the benefits are widespread.
If we could support domestic markets in this way, it could really help the forest industry in our country and partially shield us from the political vagaries of American trade negotiations.
Despite the challenges it has faced over the past 30 years or so, the British Columbia forest industry is very much alive, and is still very important to British Columbia and the Canadian economy. However, it faces serious challenges: a future with a declining wood supply, a future with more frequent catastrophic forest fires and insect epidemics due to climate change, a future with increased uncertainty around the demand for wood products, and a future with rising costs associated with trade disputes with the United States.
We need the government to do everything in its power to support the forest industry. We need a new softwood lumber agreement that is fair and flexible across all regions of Canada, an agreement that will bring certainty to the forest industry. British Columbia and hundreds of thousands of Canadians across our country depend on it.